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Indeed. Claiming DMCA on something should require KYC for the claimant. If KYC is so easy and un-burdensome that it's being applied everywhere else in our lives

Indeed. Claiming DMCA on something should require KYC for the claimant. If KYC is so easy and un-burdensome that it's being applied everywhere else in our lives surely in such a legal context where 2-parties are central to the dogma the initiating party in a legal case should have to prove it is who it says it is. Of course this will not happen because the DMCA as used in practice has nothing to do with law or justice and is just a mechanism for corporations to attack humans. That's not to say there's nothing good in the DMCA as written. The safe harbor provisions are now vital to the continued existence of independent communities on the internet. But in practice safe harbor is often ignored too.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I'm really not sure what you mean. Nobody argues that KYC is easy or non-burdensome, which is why it's not being applied everywhere else in our lives. A company like "Print-on-demand merch retailer TeePublic" would find it procedurally difficult and probably economically infeasible to rigorously verify the identity of everyone who sends it a notice of copyright infringement. It sounds like you may be envisioning a system where the burden is offloaded onto the people sending a notice, but that's just not possible. If you get an email from some person Alice you've never heard of before, you fundamentally cannot know just from reading the email whether it was sent by the actual Alice, or someone pretending to be Alice, or whether there's even such a person as Alice in the first place. To tell the difference, you would have to research Alice and find some independent way to corroborate her identity.
- superkuh 2y ago
  If we fundementally cannot know then why are we believing these claimant "persons" at all? These days it's more likely than not that a DMCA claim is not from the copyright owner (or anyone associated with the owner) of what is claimed. It seems like DMCA is broken in practice and no longer operates in the spirit of the law. I'm envisioning a system where someone has to prove they actually own the thing before they can claim it, yes. And if proving identity is so hard then maybe there shouldn't be take-downs at all. Let the legal system where identification is required take over. Stop the hundreds of millions of automated para-legal attacks and make it a more managable flood of hundreds of thousands of actual legal actions. And yes, KYC is extremely burdensome. I suppose when a DMCA claim arrives the recipient should then send back an email with a link to some third party corporation dedicated to KYC (out of a set of government approved companies) which the DMCA claimant will sign up with and pay a small fee to. Most likely the claimaint will have to have a webcam conversation with the KYC company and upload their identifying documents. The result of the identity and ownership check would then be sent to both parties and the process could proceed as per normal. This would strongly discourage illegal false claims which currently have no mitigation and make up the majority of DMCA actions.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> If KYC is so easy and un-burdensome that it's being applied everywhere else in our lives If by everywhere else you mean finance. Which means you want to burden every single website in America that accepts user-generated content with a banking-style compliance department.
- deleted 2y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I'm really not sure what you mean. Nobody argues that KYC is easy or non-burdensome, which is why it's not being applied everywhere else in our lives. A company like "Print-on-demand merch retailer TeePublic" would find it procedurally difficult and probably economically infeasible to rigorously verify the identity of everyone who sends it a notice of copyright infringement. It sounds like you may be envisioning a system where the burden is offloaded onto the people sending a notice, but that's just not possible. If you get an email from some person Alice you've never heard of before, you fundamentally cannot know just from reading the email whether it was sent by the actual Alice, or someone pretending to be Alice, or whether there's even such a person as Alice in the first place. To tell the difference, you would have to research Alice and find some independent way to corroborate her identity.

superkuh 2y ago
If we fundementally cannot know then why are we believing these claimant "persons" at all? These days it's more likely than not that a DMCA claim is not from the copyright owner (or anyone associated with the owner) of what is claimed. It seems like DMCA is broken in practice and no longer operates in the spirit of the law. I'm envisioning a system where someone has to prove they actually own the thing before they can claim it, yes. And if proving identity is so hard then maybe there shouldn't be take-downs at all. Let the legal system where identification is required take over. Stop the hundreds of millions of automated para-legal attacks and make it a more managable flood of hundreds of thousands of actual legal actions. And yes, KYC is extremely burdensome. I suppose when a DMCA claim arrives the recipient should then send back an email with a link to some third party corporation dedicated to KYC (out of a set of government approved companies) which the DMCA claimant will sign up with and pay a small fee to. Most likely the claimaint will have to have a webcam conversation with the KYC company and upload their identifying documents. The result of the identity and ownership check would then be sent to both parties and the process could proceed as per normal. This would strongly discourage illegal false claims which currently have no mitigation and make up the majority of DMCA actions.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> If KYC is so easy and un-burdensome that it's being applied everywhere else in our lives If by everywhere else you mean finance. Which means you want to burden every single website in America that accepts user-generated content with a banking-style compliance department.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]